The inner music of analytical music therapy
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Abstract
Some of you may be wondering “What is analytical music therapy and why is there a special issue of the Nordic Journal being dedicated to it?” The term analytical music therapy (AMT) refers to a specific model of practice and not just to any application of music therapy incorporating psychoanalytic practices or theories. It is a model largely developed by the British music therapist Mary Priestley (1975, 1994, 2012) whose trainees took aspects of the model into academic music therapy training programs in Europe. One person who trained directly with Priestley was Benedikte B. Scheiby, a Danish music therapist who – together with her colleague, Inge Nygaard-Pedersen – incorporated central aspects of AMT into the master’s music therapy program at Aalborg University in the early 1980s. Scheiby moved to the USA in 1990 and soon established a formal AMT training program, working with professional music therapists until her passing in 2018. Because Priestley did not establish a facility or organization devoted to the practice and dissemination of AMT, its influence was not as widespread as some other models of advanced music therapy practice. However, AMT was acknowledged and honored as one of five international models of music therapy practice at the 1999 World Congress of Music Therapy. This special issue is warranted for a few different reasons. First, in creating a model congruent with some fundamental aspects of psychoanalysis, Mary Priestley demonstrated the potency of the clinically directed use of music in effecting change at the most fundamental levels of one’s personality. She established the viability of music therapy as a primary psychotherapeutic treatment form, not merely as an adjunct to verbal psychotherapy. Second, although aspects of psychoanalysis such as gaining verbalized insight into the source of one’s emotions are important in this approach, music plays a central role in Priestley’s thinking as she considers it as important to human life “as is digestion or breathing or sleeping” (Priestley, 1975, p. 199). As we are fundamentally musical beings, the first two functions of the music therapist for Priestley are essentially musical ones: these are to act akin to a nodal point and a sympathetic string. In these ways and others, Priestley demonstrated that a psychoanalytic perspective could still place music in a central role. And last, although AMT was first developed in adult psychiatry it has proven to be sufficiently malleable to be applicable in other areas including medical settings, work with children, and in a contemporary therapy climate where relational and cultural considerations are more prominent than they were in 1975. Becoming an AMT clinician involves much more than learning the appropriate techniques and theories; AMT is fundamentally a relational model. AMT training is rooted in the trainee’s deep and personal inquiry into their relationship to music, self, and other. And just as the relationships between self, other and music are at the core,